Grandma Consuelo's Inventory

Eloy stumbled backward and the rubber sole of his shoe skidded over a formless mass that let out a dry, hollow clack, like stepping on a plastic spoon at a children's birthday party.

Beneath his left sneaker—the one with the half-peeled toe and accumulated doormat fuzz—lay a pressed-leather chew bone. It was shaped with barely six flat planes and a grainy texture of dirty beige. When he stepped on it, it didn't break; it simply bounced against the baseboard with a dull, sixteen-bit rattle.

"A bowl of what?" Eloy asked, rubbing the back of his neck. "Grandma, stop messing with me. Don't tell me that..."

A metallic chime froze the air. The cyan mist rippling at the far end of the hallway came to a dead stop, turned into a digital block of ice. Consuelo didn't blink. In front of her, a floating rectangle of desaturated blue unfolded with a flickering white border, inside of which letters appeared with typewriter thumps.

"Shut your mouth or your teeth'll catch a draft," she said, though her polygonal mouth didn't move to the rhythm of the voice. "And stand up straight. You've been carrying your spine like a question mark since the eighth grade."

The inventory menu flickered between the two of them.

[EQUIPPED ITEM: Beginner's Chainmail (Level 1). Defense: +3. Texture: Unbeveled polygons. Side effect: It itches like crazy.]

Eloy looked down just as a grid of metal plates materialized over his promotional t-shirt. The polygonal chainmail scraped against his skin like unpolished, rigid plastic, stiff in the armpits and with sharp edges that didn't bend with his ribs, but instead pushed right through the fabric without tearing it, pinching viciously.

"This cuts," he protested, trying to jam a finger down the collar to scratch his collarbone.

"It doesn't cut, it fastens," Consuelo stated from her stool. "And don't whine; we bought your cousin Manolo a wool one from the Pryca clearance bin that gave him hives just looking at it, and he didn't throw a circus like this."

"Manolo is thirty-five years old and sells insurance."

"And he's settled down nicely."

The blue frame vanished with a sharp snap. Time rushed forward again; a gust of warm air, heavy with a dense odor of overheated circuits and greasy neighborhood pizza cardboard, ruffled his bangs.

"Test out the movement," the old woman ordered, pointing down the hall with one of her knitting needles, which lacked points and ended in sharp vertices instead. "The dodge button is pressed smoothly, just like peeling a potato. If you hack at it, you'll take half the meat with you and leave yourself wide open against the wall."

Eloy flexed his knees. The armor's joint sounded like two lunchboxes crashing inside a backpack.

"I don't know how to peel potatoes smoothly, grandma. I use that plastic peeler that goes sideways."

"A shameful invention," she muttered. "Go on, roll."

He side-stepped to the right. The baseboard's collision box spat him out abruptly with a dull screech that rattled his fillings, forcing him to stumble two steps before regaining his balance. The chainmail left a hot, red stripe across his side.

"See? Like a sack of sand," Consuelo judged, without lifting her eyes from her work. "You've got the reflexes of a brick."

"It's just that the wall doesn't budge an inch."

"Walls never budge, blockhead."

Silence.

They advanced ten meters down the hall. Consuelo didn't walk; her stool simply glided over the ochre carpet with a continuous electrical hum, exactly like the one the Sanyo TV transformer made when left on all night without a signal.

Eloy rummaged through the pockets of his denim jacket as he walked, dodging another pair of synthetic bones scattered across the tiles. He pulled out the remnants of a María biscuit, broken into three pieces and full of lining fuzz.

He blew on it half-heartedly.

"Wasn't there anything to eat on this map?" he mumbled, popping the largest piece into his mouth. It tasted like dust and stale vanilla.

"There's broth in the upstairs fridge, but you haven't bothered to heat it up," Consuelo replied without looking at him. "Always the same. Waiting for things to do themselves. Just like the garden."

Eloy stopped. The piece of biscuit stuck to the roof of his mouth, dry as tinder.

"The garden wasn't just my responsibility."

"You were the one with legs to take it out on a leash before eight o'clock."

"I had exams, grandma. My classes started at eight-thirty and—"

He fell silent.

There was no use arguing with a block of data that smelled faintly of mothballs and tin solder. Besides, at the end of the bend, a familiar structure came into view: a hexagonal black plastic pedestal upon which an eight-megabyte memory card spun slowly, casting a yellowish glow that dyed the pixelated walls.

At the base of the pedestal rested a rusted iron chest, with rivets the size of bottle caps and the lid cracked open barely a couple of fingers.

"Go see if there's any ointment in there," Consuelo said, stopping her stool a meter away from the pedestal. "You look all worn out and you haven't even seen the first level yet."

Eloy crouched down. The metal of the chest was freezing, with that artificial cold of rendered objects that have never known the sun. He pulled the lid upward; the hinges screeched with audio so compressed it sounded like a canned seagull's caw.

Inside there were no green potion flasks or strips of bandages.

At the bottom of the eaten-away sheet metal rested a Penn tennis ball. The yellow felt was worn down, blackened by the damp dirt of the backyard and scored by four deep, parallel marks: two upper fangs, two lower ones, sunk into the rubber with the desperate force of a young jaw in the summer of 2004.

Eloy picked it up with his fingertips. It still retained a sticky residue, a fossilized mix of dried drool and cut grass.

A dog holds no grudge; it just remembers the time for a walk.

The phrase didn't appear in any blue menu. It sounded clear, crisp, spoken by Consuelo's raspy voice right behind him, but when Eloy turned to look at her, the old woman remained motionless, knitting her endless ball of yarn with her eyes fixed on nothingness.

And then, from the upper floor, the ochre carpet rippled like the surface of a pond when hit by a stone.

The howl fell upon them like a concrete beam. It wasn't the raspy bark of a sick animal, but a colossal bellow, amplified by invisible speaker cones, that made the polygonal ceiling vibrate and dropped a shower of gray pixels onto Eloy's shoulders.